Happy New Year

I HAVE INTERNET AGAIN, and it feels good. Hopefully everyone had a fabulous Christmas and is looking forward to an awesome New Year. We spent it very quietly at Dad’s, and surprisingly for us, had all the leftovers done with within two days, which has got to be some kind of record. Mum, unfortunately, is still making turkey pie,among other things – I am not complaining about this.

Of course, it wasn’t all fun and games – we heard the devastating news on Tuesday that the amazing Carrie Fisher had passed away following a heart attack on Christmas Eve. Not only a wonderful actress and an all-around amazing woman, Carrie was also a big favourite of mine because she never kept her mental illness quiet, and her service dog Gary was a feature at many of her public appearances. I recall – I think it might have been my Mum – well, someone I knew once, talking about Star Wars and how much I loved Princess Leia, and that other person just turning around and saying, ‘Well, you know Carrie Fisher’s a drug addict, don’t you?’ As if that negated every single one of her achievements. As if that was the sum of her life’s work. She lived all her life with bipolar disorder and everything that entailed, and she not only survived, but thrived. She wrote some incredibly funny, incredibly honest memoirs, she starred in one of the biggest blockbusters on the twentieth century, and don’t even get me started on her interview comments prior to ‘The Force Awakens.’ She was human. We’re all human. We all have our weaknesses. Let’s remember her as a woman who did not survive her mental illness – she lived with it, and my God, did she live.

Carrie herself wrote a brilliant column for the Guardian, and in November she wrote one about living with bipolar disorder. She absolutely says it better than I ever could. The column can be found here.

In other news, in my internet travels I came across another article – this time in the Telegraph – talking about a 2008 interview with Daniel Radcliffe (of eponymous Harry Potter fame) in which he discusses living with dyspraxia. I’ll admit to being quite surprised – I like Harry Potter but I’m not a rabid fan and the eighth film pretty much wrecked the entire franchise for me (Fantastic Beasts notwithstanding), so I don’t follow it that closely. Also because dyspraxia is not usually a condition which makes the news – or anything else for that matter. More recently, Cara Delvingne of Suicide Squad and Paper Towns gave an interview in Vogue in June 2015 in which she talks about having depression and dyspraxia and being bisexual – a cocktail of conditions very close to my own experience. And it needs to happen more. I notice that, when I talk about my dyspraxia and my experience with it, barely anyone bats an eyelid – but the second I bring my autism into the mix, everybody wants to know.

Regarding Daniel Radcliffe, his statement about living with dyspraxia was responded to by the Dyspraxia Foundation USA. It has its own page. Yet the corresponding foundation in the UK made almost no mention of it, and regrettably they don’t keep archives as far as I can tell. I don’t believe that one condition is any more important than another, and autism is sometimes the more obvious of the two – nevertheless, learning that you have something wrong with you, no matter what that ‘wrong’ may be, is a very scary moment. You’re being suddenly thrown into this scary void that not everyone really understands, and the more people that come out and talk about these problems, the better. I have to sit down and explain what dyspraxia is every time it comes up, and it does get rather wearing. I have to explain to prospective employers when I go in for interviews, that I’m not being rude or nervous, I genuinely don’t like to make eye contact – and only about 50% of them are sympathetic to this.

Carrie Fisher was spoken of as being incredibly brave in talking about her mental illness. I’m not sure brave is the right word. Gutsy, yes. But also absolutely the right thing to do. We need to talk about these things, and to coin a feminist shout that echoes through the inter-web at various points, “Representation Matters!” Be that on the big screen, small screen, or real-life celebrities talking about what makes them human – their flaws and foibles. They make all of us human, as much as we’d like to ignore it.